GENEVA, SWITZERLAND  --  Swiss AIDS experts are being criticized by International colleagues after they issued a statement Thursday saying that some people with HIV can safely have unprotected sex with non-infected partners.

According to the Swiss National AIDS Commission, some HIV positive patients who meet strict conditions, including successful antiretroviral treatment to suppress the virus and who do not have any other sexually transmitted diseases, do not pose a danger to others, AP reports.

The new guidelines, published this week in the Bulletin of Swiss Medicine, astonished leading AIDS researchers in Europe and North America who have long promoted safe sex with a condom as the single most effective way of preventing the spread of the disease — apart from abstinence.

"Not only is [the Swiss proposal] dangerous, it's misleading and it is not considering the implications of the biological facts involved with HIV transmission," said Jay Levy, director of the Laboratory for Tumor and AIDS Virus Research at the University of California in San Francisco.

The World Health Organization called the new Swiss guidelines experimental and said Switzerland would be the first country in the world to try this approach.

"There is still some concern that you can never guarantee that somebody will not be infectious, and the evidence I have to say is not conclusive," said Charlie Gilks, director of AIDS treatment and prevention at WHO. "Many countries in western Europe would regard this as an interesting experiment," he said. "We are not going to be changing in any way our very clear recommendations that people on treatment continue to practice safer sex, including protected sex with a condom, in any relationship," Gilks said.

Last update: 02-01-2008 14:10